As companies move towards environmentally responsible business practices, there is considerable interest in the management and optimization of power consumption in business machines. This movement is sometimes referred to as the “green” computing movement. Even from pure cost and constraints perspectives, the information technology industry recognizes the importance of managing and optimizing power usage in computing devices. In a conventional computing environment, power meters or sensors may be used to monitor the electrical power consumption of hardware. Power levels and computational loading may be monitored and then redistributed via various means across a plurality of hardware machines so as to minimize the carbon footprint while maintaining the same service levels. On an individual machine level, the state (e.g., active, inactive, hibernating or standby state) and power usage of the machine may also be monitored and managed in response to present or anticipated needs. Therefore, power monitoring systems are integral to the management of power usage. However, conventional environments do not provide analogous systems for monitoring the power usage of workloads such as virtual machines and/or other virtualized entities (e.g., virtualized applications and virtual desktop sessions) executing on a hardware machine. Workloads may further include software applications, web applications, terminal server sessions and operating system instances, and any of these may be executed by other workloads.